Who to vote for, Brown or Cameron?

It’s the start of a new decade, and in the political realm it is the year where we are going to have the first general election that the majority of you reading this will be able to vote in.

So what are the choices? Well, we’ve got the choice of voting Labour and keeping in a party who saw us go through the recession worse off than the majority of the other countries of our economic calibre, whilst being constantly told that we would be better off than said countries. Or, we can vote Conservative, who are promising that they will be reducing the size of government – and therefore reducing the number of people employed by the government when we have unemployment already at a ludicrously high level – as well as budget cuts to the fundamentals of our modern welfare state.

What to do, what to do… well I suppose we will always have the abstention vote that is the Liberal Democrats, but is that enough? The party elected in the election will be in power during our first few years of being in the real world; this will massively affect each and every single one of the current students studying right now.

Obviously, each of you have to make up your own mind at some point, but right now I can honestly say that with all of the facts in front of me, I am actually scared of what a Conservative government would do to this country – to us as students and to us as future members of the job-market. Yes, Labour have absolutely messed up in various areas, but the Conservatives are intending to reduce the safety nets that allow me to sleep somewhat safe at night. Should our degrees lead to nothing job-wise, in an economy which is watching graduates join the unemployment lines en masse, the safety nets are all that make me think “it might be ok after I graduate”. Do I want to be on the dole? Do I hell, but I’d like to know that I’m definitely going to be covered should everything go completely wrong.

Granted, my opinion may well change before the election is called and I could well be chanting “go Tories” at some point – anything could happen – but right now, I’m afraid it’s time to steal the American chant of “four more years! four more years!” and pray that the party sacks off Brown, before he has a stroke from the stress of being hated by the public as much as he is, and just get down to business and save all of our sorry behinds.

"If I can come back, we can come back". Lord Mandleson addresses the Labour party conference. Photo from the Independent

It’s that time of year- the time of year that people get ‘flu’. But, it’s also the time of year that the major political parties in Britain have their annual conferences.  If you’ve missed them this year then the next couple of hundred words will attempt to fill you in with some of the major points.

First things first, The Liberal Democrats. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman announced that if his party is elected he would introduce a tax on homes that value above £1m.

Next came the Labour Party conference which did not get off to the best start but was kicked into gear with Lord Mandelson’s speech in which he announced he was adding extra money to the pot that is funding Labour’s ‘Car Scrappage Scheme’. A good policy but not one he had to announce like he was eradicating world poverty.

The speech by PM Gordon Brown, said to be his make or break speech (again), went well with a standing ovation within 3 minutes- after reeling off many reasons why Britain is a better place because of the Labour Party. He announced help for young mothers and announced that tax breaks for the middle-class would be cut to pay for it. He announced reform for the electoral system, Parliament and the House of Lords, and said he will scrap the ID cards scheme. He didn’t really generate a ‘buzz’.

Overall, the Labour Party conference was a week of anti-climax but with substance nonetheless.

Finally, the Conservative conference kicked into gear and started off with the euro-sceptics picking up the pace and causing delightful trouble. In an interview prior to the conference, Cameron would not commit to a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, even though he has constantly criticised the government for not holding one.

The Shadow Chancellor George Osborne announced that a Conservative government would raise the retirement age to 66 and would introduce a public sector pay freeze, both accepted measures by the Labour Party.

Mr Cameron’s speech was less policy and substance and more direction and ideology. He set out, in a structured way, how he would like to see Britain in the future and his desire to change it. One would have to decide for themselves as to whether his views are relevant and if his way of changing Britain will work.

One important point to make is that there was certainly an emphasis on reducing the size of the state, or as previous Conservatives have put it, ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’, with an emphasis on giving more power to his ministers and devolving power in general. His speech certainly generated a lot of buzz- a good way to finish any conference.

The two conferences were quite different. One was well received in the media, well presented and went as well as any leader could hope, with some cracks showing regarding divisions on Europe. The other didn’t look great in the media, with turnout looking rather low. It was presented fairly and the leader’s speech was decent.

But which one will generate votes for the up-coming election? For me, it is the Labour Conference.

Labour spoke on how it has helped Britain over the last 12 years, how it will continue to do so and didn’t worry about whether Brown looked like a celebrity. The Conservative Conference on the other hand was Cameron’s predictably media-friendly event.

Post-conference the Conservative’s lost points in a YouGov poll, leaving them with a nine point lead- are the British people starting to see through Cameron’s image before he has had the chance the to be elected?

Lack of loans may spell disaster as 'problem' files are deleted from the system. Image: UCLAN.ac.uk

It’s taken 87 minutes on hold, three phone arguments with some very rude and unhelpful Scottish people at Student Finance England (ironic isn’t it) and I still do not have my loan. Turns out my local council, who used to sort out the loans, decided “problem” applications would be deleted from the system and all knowledge of the student ever applying would be denied during the change over to the new company.

Of course, mine was considered a “problem”, resulting in me having to spend countless hours listening to SFE’s very poor choice in hold music, namely Liberty-X’s “Just a Little”, on repeat, on a very bad connection.

After being shunted from department to department, supervisor to manager and back to someone on the “help” desk, I was told I would have to fully re-apply and that it would take 6-8 weeks for my application to be processed.

This was on a Friday. My Landlord was collecting my first term’s rent on Monday, resulting in the most girly and uncharacteristic hissy fit cum nervous and mental breakdown in history.

I can literally say my blood, sweat and tears have gone into trying to get my student loan this year and, comforted only slightly after reading that it wasn’t just me that hadn’t received their loan on time, and that around 170,000 other students-mainly first years- had also been stranded by the mass-changeover that has taken place.

Should such a big change have happened on such a large scale? I feel it would have maybe benefited everybody if they had been made a year at a time, starting with just new applicants this year, leaving the other years to deal with their local council’s attempts at sorting their finances out.

I am not trying to criticise SFE, I’m sure any other company trying to take on the sheer amount of student finance applicants the first time would encounter the exact same problems; it’s just left a hell of a lot of students up a certain creek without a certain paddle.

Luckily for me, my landlord was very understanding as she had had more tenants with exactly the same problems, but some people may not have been granted the same luxury. I am sure somewhere, some may not have been so nice and demanded the money or evicted their tenants.

Luckily my Knight in shining armor arrived in the nick of time in the form of my 70-something Grandmother, who gladly loaned me the rent money until I do get my loan. Whenever that may be.

Pound Force create a flowery pound sign in MP Alan Davis's garden in protest

Unknown to most – I’m sure – University of Huddersfield’s Harold Wilson lecture of 2009 was given by Lord David Steel and when expenses were brought up during his question time with students he pointed out that when he first became an MP, in the mid 1960s, MPs were paid pittance and expected to make the bulk of their living outside of their duties of the job. Today we’ve not only got to the point where to be an MP holds a substantial pay packet – being anywhere between the basic salary of £64,766 to a whopping £197,689 for the Prime Minister in 2009 – but furthermore, the MPs have claimed expenses of larger amounts than many people earn in a year.

However, the question that I put to you about the expenses scandal is this – Who is to blame?

Numerous papers would suggest that the MPs are at fault, and with claims such as Douglas Hogg’s of £2,115, for clearing the moat on his estate, and Sir Gerald Kaufman’s of £1,800, for an antique rug imported from New York, who could blame them? But, as a student who has studied politics and a self-defined pragmatist, I would suggest that the root problem of this scandal is that of the Civil Service and the Speaker of the House of the time Michael Martin. I suggest this purely because these are the people who approved every claim, either by not checking the validity of the claims, or by looking the other way as, for example, MPs ‘flipped’ their second home addresses to refurbish multiple houses at the tax payers’ expense.

However, I would like to suggest another side to this debate, one that has had very little air-time, if any at all, and that is if you had the chance to claim on expenses, would you? Travel expenses for petrol in any job or trip tends to overpay the driver by measuring a price per mile travelled, and yet that does not hit the papers as scandal. Now I am by no means excusing the actions of MPs, but I am suggesting that the MPs were in a system where it was not only easy to claim, but a common norm to claim for these things, therefore I would suggest that the system is a massive contributor to the scandal, coupled with a good number of horrifically immoral choices from certain MPs.

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